In conventional a.c. plasma display technology, orthogonal conductor arrays are formed on a pair of glass plates and the conductor arrays, when fabricated, are disposed substantially orthogonal to each other and overcoated with a dielectric layer, the intersection of a pair of conductors defining a display site or cell. When write signals are selectively applied across orthogonal conductor sets of the conventional a.c. plasma display, the fields at addressed cells produce a localized discharge in the area between conductors providing a visible display. The display is maintained by a lower amplitude sustain signal which combines with the wall charge potential to continuously discharge the selected cells.
Each discharge tends to spread beyond the edges of the conductors into the region between lines. Discharge spreading results from coupling between confronting conductors, beyond the immediate area of congruency, where the electric field remains strong. Minimum spacing between lines, i.e., display resolution, is determined, among other factors, by the requirement to keep the plasma of adjacent cells separated. Panel gap, dielectric thickness and line width are other factors which contribute to the minimum allowable line spacing. These indirect means of controlling discharge spread stem from the "unbounded" character of the electric fields produced by two flat, orthogonal conductors, and discharge spreading diminishes with distance from the origin.
While the various technology problems relative to conventional twin substrate a.c. plasma panels have been resolved, the process of manufacturing such displays is complex and of substantial duration, such that the cost of such displays remains relatively high. For a more thorough description of plasma panel fabrication, reference is made to U.S. Pat. No. 3,837,734 "Gas Panel Fabrication", assigned to the assignee of the instant invention.
An alternative form of an a.c. plasma display is a single sided panel. One sided or single substrate panels are known in the art and have been described in the literature. Such panels generally entail a single substrate or glass plate on which various layers of conductors and dielectrics are formed and suitably insulated from one another. Similarly, in single substrate a.c. plasma panels, the fields resulting from coupling between orthogonal conductors outside cell boundaries are strong enough to produce a plasma which extends beyond the mutual overlap boundaries of the conductors. Poor plasma confinement within such displays necessitates wider spacing between cells and imposes a limitation on the resolution heretofore attainable with previous single substrate plasma panel designs. Finally, when one sided plasma panel technology is extended to color, the tendency of the positive ions produced during discharge to bombard and destroy or degrade the phosphors has limited the development of a multi-color capability in one sided panels. It is toward the solution of these problems in a single sided plasma panel that the present invention is directed.